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Abstract:
While grammatical gender is widespread across the world's
languages, its role in processing is poorly understood. Wicha,
Bates, Orozco, Reyes, Hernandez and Gavaldón (submitted)
found that gender interacts with semantic information during
on-line sentence processing, to facilitate or inhibit
picture-naming times in Spanish. The current study uses
event-related potentials (ERPs) to further examine the nature and
time course of the effect of grammatical gender in sentence
processing. Native Spanish speakers listened for comprehension to
Spanish sentences, wherein a noun was replaced by a line drawing.
The object depicted was either semantically congruent or
incongruent within the sentence context. Additionally, the object's
name agreed or disagreed in gender with the preceding article. Data
were analyzed from the onsets of the article and drawing.
Semantically incongruent drawings elicited a classic N400,
regardless of gender agreement. There was also an effect of gender
expectation on the ERP to the article, with a widely distributed
negativity between 300-500ms after onset, larger for unexpected
than expected articles. Contrary to previous studies there was no
indication of a P600 effect to gender-agreement violations at the
noun (i.e., drawing). These results will be compared to findings
from visual word presentation of the same paradigm. In sum, both
gender and semantic information influenced the integration of a
target with a sentence's meaning, albeit in different ways.
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